The Hudson River School

Rating:
Summary: Wilderness Enough....
Review: Outstanding. If you can only get one book about this defining movement in American art, get this one. An absorbing and comprehensive grasp of the movement of the Hudson River School with stunning full-color reproductions. Best of all is the well researched narrative on the flow and development of the HRS, from its beginnings, through maturity and finally its end. A must for art history students and anyone susceptible to enchantment.

Rating:
Summary: Great artwork; large and colorful; good accompanying text
Review: This is not a giant book, but it certainly is a beautiful one, in which you'll find a decent helping of full-color plates that portray the majestic representation of idealized landscape painting that came to be known as the Hudson River School.

In an easily readable fourteen-page introduction, author Louise Minks takes us from about 1825, when the definition of this genre of landscape painting was beginning to form, to the last decades of the 19th Century, when the term "Hudson River School" came into vogue as a way of distancing the style from the emerging Barbizon School in France. Ms. Minks recounts the goings-on of the writers, patrons and artists which influenced many Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Martin Heade, George Inness, Worthington Whittredge and Albert Bierstadt, to name a few. Twenty black-and-white illustrations (mostly photos of paintings and noteworthy people) appear along with the text.

The 80 color plates, about half of which extend to both pages of the open book, are arranged according to phases of the Hudson River School development: "Formative," "Mature," and "Expansionist." Each phase is introduced with a page-long synopsis of what was happening at the time the artwork on the following pages was created. As expected, Cole, Bierstadt and Church are the most represented (25 artists overall). Also, Ms. Minks made sure to include in the color plates the artwork that was most discussed in the introduction. The color printing is of excellent quality, as is the paper stock on which the artwork appears. Given the size of the pages, I found it easy to spend a long time admiring all that was going on in each painting.